"This project that is about to be launched fulfills one of the requirements of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), since information and communications technology (ICT) has been recognized as an engine for growth," said Vice President Sam Sumana at a recent Freetown workshop organized to publicize the project.
The United Nations' MDGs are eight goals to be achieved by 2015 that respond to the world's main development challenges.
The workshop was supported by the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) and Commonwealth Telecommunications Organisation (CTO).
The MCT project is aimed at promoting interconnectivity, to bring people in Sierra Leone, especially those in remote areas, closer to the outside world, according to Sumana.
More than 70 percent of Sierra Leoneans are not computer literate and a quarter of the population live in Freetown, where the bulk of the country's info-tech centers are situated.
Highlighting some of the benefits of the project, Information Minister Ibrahim Kargbo established that ICT can play a dramatic role in the socio-economic development of the nation, and the MCT project will enable rural people to voice their needs and pressure their decision makers to put them in a position to have access to information.
However, Kargbo also highlighted some of the challenges facing the project, including cost of interconnectivity, lack of electric power supplies, high operational and maintenance costs, dilapidated postal services, lack of human resources and lack of infrastructure facilities.
Project coordinator Donald Browne Mark, of Dunamis Systems Ltd., said the telecenters will function as resource facilities.
"The telecenters are meant to be multipurpose because they will be geared toward providing multiple services to promote e-learning, e-governance, e-health, e-commerce and e-agro-based ... services," he said.
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Autor(en)/Author(s): Olusegun Abolaji Ogundeji
Quelle/Source: Computerworld Kenya, 27.03.2009
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